Press Photo/Paul L. Newby IIZondervan CEO Maureen "Moe" Girkins poses in the board room at the company's Cascade Township headquarters. Girkins says she draws on motherhood in her corporate leadership. It's OK to love the people you work with. Says Zondervan colleague Verne Kenney: "Sometimes loving is understanding what a person's deficiencies are, then fixing them. It's not just the warm, fuzzy loving. It's an active verb. How do you really enable people to succeed, to thrive." With Girkins at the helm, he says, "It's a very energizing time."

Even as a little girl, Maureen "Moe" Girkins had big goals.

"I wanted 12 children, and I wanted to be an international businesswoman," she says. "Those were my two goals. I wanted to be a trailblazer and take on more challenges than anybody thinks is realistic."

She smiles.

As a high-powered executive for such companies as AT&T and Motorola, she has traveled the world, clinched deals, master-minded innovation.

"But somehow the Lord knew I wasn't cut out for 12 children," she says.

Two would be good. Having them changed the way the international businesswoman did business.

Girkins, 54, is president and CEO of Zondervan, the Christian publishing firm in Cascade Township. She took over in January, the first female CEO in Zondervan's 77-year history.

Driven and dynamic, she has a history of demanding jobs -- but none of them in publishing. She's a computer whiz who made a name for herself in the telecommunications industry. She can take computer code "that's like a bowl of spaghetti," she says, and rewrite it to make a computer run 100 times faster.

Open and innovative, she often surprises the people who report to her.

"I'm pretty much an anomaly from what people are used to," she says.

BIO BOX

Girkins, the fifth of six children, couldn't dig up any baby photos. Her mother calls her "the forgotten one." "She makes sure she's noticed now," notes her husband, Kim.

Five things to know about Moe Girkins:

• She spent several weeks in rural Mississippi, helping victims of Hurricane Katrina. "That was a life-changing experience for me," she says.

• She's not shy. She tells of a personality test she took early in her career. "The consultant said I scored 100 percent extrovert. He said he'd never seen anyone score 100 percent extrovert on a Myers-Briggs (Type Indicator) before."

• She's pursuing a master's degree in divinity at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. "I was in heaven at seminary," she says.

• She communicates with clicks. When she started at Zondervan, Girkins gathered groups of employees and asked them questions. She turned her back and devised a way for them to answer by clicking their fingers, "so people could give honest answers in a safe environment," says Verne Kenney, executive vice president of sales. "When she asks questions, people still start clicking."

Last month, at the International Christian Retailers show, Zondervan unveiled Symtio, calling it a first-of-its-kind system for selling audio and electronic books. Shoppers will buy plastic cards that look like book covers and take them home to download the book.

Symtio was invented by Verne Kenney, Zondervan's executive vice president of sales. But, Kenney says, Girkins made it happen.

"There's just a whole new way of approaching things now," Kenney says. "I told Moe, 'I've got an idea I want you to see.' I drew it on the white board. I said, 'We've been talking about digital, but we don't have a program.'

"She immediately said, 'Go do this. It's good.' With her, you don't have to know everything before you get started," he says. "Instead of ready, aim, fire, it can be ready, fire, aim. If you know an idea is good, it's good enough to start.

"She's got a bigger vision than most people in this industry."

Motherhood changed her

Part of that vision comes through those eyes they say mothers have in the backs of their heads.

Girkins says motherhood made her a different, better leader. She wrote a book about it, called "Mother Leads Best: 50 Women Who are Changing the Way Organizations Define Leadership." It was published in 2005 by Dearborn trade publishing. It's under her former name, Moe Grzelakowski.

Girkins got married the month after she graduated from college. The marriage lasted 23 years before ending in divorce.

She has two sons, Brian, 23 ,and Michael, 21, and a stepdaughter, Blair, 16.

She was an executive at Bell Labs when Brian was born. She took six months of leave.

"Five months into it, I called my mother and said, 'I'm thinking of not going back.' My mom said she had to do something and she would call me to talk about it later.

"She called me later and said, 'I announced my retirement today. I'm gonna watch your child. I didn't send you to all that school so you could stay home and have babies.'"

Girkins went back to work a different woman. Motherhood, she says, had profoundly changed her.

Driven at work before she had a child, she expected everybody else to be driven, too. She once received the Ayatollah Khomeini award from co-workers.

Having baby Brian changed everything.

"The nurturing side of me poured out at home with as much intensity as the workaholic side of me had in the office," she says. Suddenly, relationships were important, she says. She was collaborative and compassionate.

"In essence," she says, "I became more human."

Her maternal instinct became part of her leadership style, she says.

"For me, it's about engaging people, being real and open," she says. "Openly showing that you care. I could almost say it's about loving people. Being comfortable loving the people you work with.

"The more I cared, the better my teams performed, and the more I was rewarded," she says. The next thing she knew, AT&T asked her to train other executives how to care.

Everyone pitches in

Holding son Michael: Graduation with MBA from Northwestern in 1988. Girkins started out in liberal arts in college, "then my mom said, 'There's something called computer science I hear about. You should try that.' I took a computer class. I never struggled so hard in my life. ... Then I got my grade -- an A minus. I thought, 'That's what I want to do for the rest of my life.'" She smiles. "I conquered it." She loves conquering things.

She grew up on the south side of Chicago, the fifth child out of six in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood.

Her mom and dad, Antoinette and Jim Barry, worked at the same construction company since Girkins was in third grade. She knew she could grow up to be a working mom, she says, because she watched her mom do it.

"My mom and dad had his-and-hers ironing boards," she says with a smile. "We'd be watching TV and mom and dad would both be ironing."

The family was close and organized. Everybody pitched in -- a necessity, she says, with a bunch of kids and two working parents. She cooked for the family when she was 10.

She earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degrees in computer science and management from Northwestern University. By college graduation, "I felt I had the world by the tail," she says. "I was getting job offers with higher salaries than anybody."

Her first job was as a systems analyst at Amoco. It bored her. No challenge. So she left for a job at Bell Laboratories, where she was surrounded by brain power, designing computers that make phones work.

It was detailed, painstaking, sophisticated work. She tells of a new program to make long-distance calls.

"It had 20 million lines of code. There were 10,000 programmers working on it. It was the most sophisticated technology in the world."

Meanwhile, as part of its leadership training, Bell sent Girkins on a unique self-discovery mission.

"They submersed me in the ghetto for four days," she recalls. "It was extremely intense and emotional. It was the best training I ever received. It's designed to get you to face your own natural bias."

She slept in an inner-city hotel, walked the neighborhood.

"I was all by myself, and I was the only white person," she says.

What did she learn? Girkins thinks for a minute.

"I learned that I'm inherently biased," she says. "It's important to act in total awareness, so in some ways you can compensate for it. The whole work environment was about learning to become a better person."

She would file that away. It became part of her own leadership mantra.

The honeymooners: Girkins with husband, Kim, six years ago at Lake Louise, Canada. "The people at Zondervan will find this out," Kim says. "She's always thinking, not just about improving business, but about improving relationships among people."

Doing things differently

"Because of her, a lot of firsts happened," says Paula Serratore, who worked with Girkins at AT&T and Motorola. Girkins set up brainstorming centers, loaned people back and forth between departments, "and just did things a little differently," says Serratore, now executive director of the Association of Legal Administrators chapter in Washington, D.C.

"It's more about what she doesn't do," Serratore says. "She doesn't shut people down. Everybody had a say. When you're around her, it's like you're a better person."

Girkins moved from AT&T to Motorola, traveling the world.

"Two nights a week, I slept on an airplane," she says, on her way to Australia, India, Israel, southeast Asia.

When her son was in fifth grade and she was overseas on a business trip, he called her at 3 a.m. in India to ask if he had a big butt. Girls were staring at it, he told her, and he didn't know why.

"We had to have the sex talk over the phone," she says. "It wouldn't have been my first choice, but at least he felt he could call me."

She and her husband divorced in 1999, at the height of her career heading strategic marketing at Motorola.

Press Photo/Lori Niedenfuer CoolUnder the instructional eyes of her golf pro husband, Kim Girkins, Moe tees off recently at Watermark Country Club in Cascade. "Golf is like their second church," her son Michael says of Moe and Kim. Adds her other son, Brian: "It's an unfortunate thing when your mother can outdrive all the 200-pound male athletes in the family."

Amid the turmoil, she left Motorola to work for Dell. But things were falling apart.

"Divorce rocked my world for about three years," she says. "I thought I could handle everything, but I wasn't handling it very well."

She sighs.

"That whole organized family unit was not so organized," she says. "At the time my kids needed me most, they were getting freedom.

"The first weekend my son threw a party, my reaction was I put cameras everywhere," she says. "I had cameras in the trees." The tech expert threw technology at the problem. She shakes her head.

After four months at Dell, she quit -- with no plans to work anywhere else.

"Not having a corporate identity was hard," she says. "Not having a position of power. That, plus being divorced -- my world was rocked. It led me to some real soul-searching.

"So I come to my son Brian, who was 15, and tell him I'm not going to work for Dell anymore. And he said, 'Then who are you gonna be, Mom?'"

She pauses. "That really struck me," she says. "I've taught my child that who you are for work is who you are.

"In the winter of 1999, I went to 120 basketball games," she says. "It was the most fun I had in my life. To be there, and be there for every minute of it, was a gift. I wouldn't have figured this out if I were working full time."

Now 23 and a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, Brian tells of his mom's unwavering support, but says she needs to work.

"She's tried to retire a couple of times, but it never really works," he says. "She's gotta be in that high-stress, high-octane environment. That's where she excels."

Courtesy Photo/Girkins familyMaureen "Moe" Girkins, bottom right, CEO of Cascade Township publisher Zondervan, poses for a family photo. With her are the family dog, Rebel, stepdaughter Blair, 16; son Michael Grzelakowski, 21; husband, Kim Girkins; and son Brian Grzelakowski, 23. "She's peppier and more excited since she went back to work," says son Michael. "She feels like she's making a difference, especially with this job, since it's not a big Fortune 500 company. She feels like she's making a difference with God."

Married again

By 2002, she was married again, to a golf pro named Kim Girkins. They had dated in college, "and I was crazy mad over him," she recalls. "I felt myself falling too hard and too fast, and it scared the daylights out of me.

"We stayed friends our whole life," she says. "After I got divorced, he was a safe date, because I knew I'd never fall in love with him again. I was too driven; he was too laid back."

She laughs.

"He's perfect for me," she says. "As focused as I am, he's unfocused. He helps me smell the roses every day."

Well, not every day. They have a long-distance marriage for now, together on weekends. She's renting a house on the Thornapple River and building a house in Douglas. He's still in Illinois, with plans to move here.

"She's the most interesting and fascinating person I've ever met in my life," Kim says. "The amount of energy and enjoyment she puts into life and gets out of it amazes me. In everything she does, she jumps in with both feet."

He did more than help her sniff roses.

"My husband brought me from Catholic to evangelical," she says. "I was certain the only way to go to heaven was to be Catholic. I thought I was good enough to get to heaven, and he challenged that. He'd say, 'We're all filthy rags,' meaning we're all sinners.

"That was a big belief change to make," she says. "And very personal. Once I got it -- that we're saved by grace -- I was starving for biblical understanding. I couldn't get enough."